So, I’ve come to realize that I have a few locations that my subconscious likes to go to when it needs a setting. It’s neat because a few of them are somewhat founded in reality, while others are just steady recreations of a similar landscape-likely because that the stereotypical way I view a setting. Like if I’m amongst hills covered in mist, I always start on a rounded hilltop with a stone road to one side and a single dying tree to the other. 

The locations that are based in reality are the ones that actually creep me out when I think about them. A few are actual places that I’ve been, and I recall them in close detail save for places I hadn’t been. Those corners and hallways just end outside of my vision I suppose. But these are often places like one of the malls downtown before they were renovated, or a section of a path through a park that I used to frequent. The locations that my mind perverts are the scary ones. There are versions of a house I used to live in, where a panel in the storage room would open up and reveal a pathway into an old beauty salon- equipment like pump chairs and sit-in hair dryers everywhere. Or a house down the street that had a massive spiral staircase covered in red velvety material, despite the house itself being too small for it. That kind of space dilation happens when I dream about something happening at university, too. I don’t always form the campus as it is in reality, in my head. Instead, some design themes are consistent: a long central building with a few attached buildings, a quad separating old campus from new, a housing building situated between buildings with offices and classes. Although, my version of the central building makes them 10 stories tall with catacombs of laboratories in the basements and that housing building is more than just a hallway with shops-it’s a gigantic stone marketplace, teeming with life.

I think I might draw out the campus in my head, if only to assure myself that I can survive those zombie apocalypse dreams I’ve been having there.